FELTON, Sir Henry, 2nd bt. (1619-90), of Shotley and Playford, Suff.

The Feltons of Playford claimed a descent in the male line as far back as William Bertram, Baron Mitford, in the twelfth century. Their surname was assumed to derive from Upper Felton in Northumberland; it had been adopted by Bertram’s descendant, Sir William de Felton, as early as the fourteenth century. Sir William was summoned to the council held at Westminster in 1342, and several other members of the family may have sat in some of the Parliaments held later in that century.27Felton Fam. 9; Hervey, ‘Playford’, 26, 49-50; CP v. 294; Morant, Essex, ii. 337. It was also during the fourteenth century that, through the acquisition of lands at Coddenham and Shotley, the family first became linked with Suffolk.28Felton Fam. 18-19; Bodl. Tanner 257, f. 472. Their estates at Playford were acquired through inheritance in the sixteenth century.29Copinger, Manors of Suff. iii. 88; Vis. Suff. 1561, 1577 and 1612, 190. The head of the family during the early years of the seventeenth century, Sir Anthony Felton, married well, taking as his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of the 1st Baron Grey of Groby. Their son, Henry (the MP’s father) inherited the estates in 1613, and was raised to the rank of baronet in 1620.30CB, i. 154; ‘Will of Mary Felton of Shotley, AD 1602’, E. Anglian, n.s. iii. 281-2. The most famous of the Suffolk Feltons, John Felton, the assassin of the 1st duke of Buckingham, was probably a relative of the Shotley branch, but, if so, can only have been a very distant connection.31‘The assassination of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham’, Gent. Mag. n.s. xxiv (1845), 139-40n; Hervey, ‘Playford’, 39-41; Oxford DNB, ‘John Felton’.

Felton inherited the baronetcy in 1624 at the age of only five.32C142/421/117. Three years later his wardship was granted by the crown to his mother, Lady Dorothy, his grandmother, Lady Elizabeth Felton, John Gosnold and Bassingbourne Gawdy.33Coventry Docquets, 467; Bodl. Tanner 98, ff. 21-5; CSP Dom. Add. 1625-49, p. 501; Hervey, ‘Playford’, 44-6; Copinger, Manors of Suff. iii. 16, 340. At the time of his marriage in 1637, Felton was still a ward and control of the family estates (which, excluding his grandmother’s jointure lands at Playford, were then valued at £799 a year) was transferred to his father-in-law, the wealthy Suffolk landowner, Sir Lionel Tollemache†.34Hervey, ‘Playford’, 45-7. The wedding between the young Sir Henry and his bride, Sir Lionel’s daughter, Susanna, took place in December 1637 at Great Fakenham, one of the Tollemache seats in north Suffolk.35Hervey, ‘Playford’, 54; Copinger, Manors of Suff. iii. 90. Felton had succeeded to the family estates by March 1640, when he was assessed for Ship Money of 2s 6d for his lands at Shotley.36Suff. Ship-Money Returns, 216. His appointment in June 1640 as one of the piracy commissioners for Suffolk should have been the first of what, in normal circumstances, he could reasonably have expected to be a series of rapid promotions to all the usual local offices.37C181/5, f. 176. The outbreak of civil war in 1642, however, delayed Felton’s emergence as a major figure within Suffolk by the best part of two decades.

What little is known about Felton during the 1640s suggests that he was not keen to involve himself on either side in the civil war. At some point prior to May 1643, he was imprisoned by the Commons, possibly in connection with an incident which took place in April 1643 in which a number of Suffolk and Norfolk gentry were taken into custody when the ship they were travelling on was stopped. Where this ship was bound is unclear and it may be that the Commons ordered Felton’s release on 3 May because it was satisfied that his presence on the ship was innocent.38CJ iii. 65b, 68a. Similarly, the king’s decision to name him as one of the new Suffolk justices of the peace in October 1643 may simply have been an attempt to encourage a possible supporter to play a more active role in his cause.39Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 92. If so, it was bound to fail, for the supporters of Parliament were securely in control of Suffolk and it was probably with this in mind that, towards the end of 1643, Felton agreed to lend £3 10s to Samuel Moody*, the treasurer of Suffolk, to support one of the local cavalry regiments raised by Parliament.40SP28/176, unfol.: acct. of Samuel Moody, Nov. 1643-Jan. 1644. It may also be significant that the Committee for Compounding did not consider it necessary to take action against Felton as an active royalist.

Almost nothing is known for certain about Felton between the mid-1640s and the mid-1650s. The single surviving letter by Felton from that period, which confines itself to family matters, indicates that in February 1654 he was probably living at Fakenham.41Eg. 2717, f. 73. In fact, this inactivity may do much to explain Felton’s election as an MP to the second protectoral Parliament of 1656. It is likely that he gathered some of his support from among those Suffolk electors who, wishing to signal that they wanted a return to the traditional order, viewed him as a candidate untainted by recent events. The 1,362 votes which were cast for Felton when the county poll was held at Stowmarket on 20 August 1656 were enough to win for him one of the ten county seats in the new Parliament. The result placed him eighth out of a field of 22, and, had he received two more votes, he would have overtaken Daniel Wall* to come seventh.42Suff. RO (Ipswich), GC17/755, f. 140v. As with many novice Members, Felton made no mark on the proceedings of his first Parliament. His electoral success was nevertheless recognized almost at once in his appointment to the commission of the peace and to other important county bodies.43C192/13/6, f. 82; Suff. ed. Everitt, 134; A. and O. The outcome of the elections in Suffolk to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659 made it even clearer that Felton was benefiting from the backlash against the protectorate. On 17 January 1659 Sir Henry easily topped the poll for the Suffolk seats, probably receiving 1,288 votes as against the 1,030 gained by the other successful candidate, Sir Thomas Barnardiston*. The two losing candidates, Henry North* and William Gibbs*, trailed far behind.44Suff. RO (Ipswich), GC17/755, f. 140v. Once elected, Felton again appears to have been inactive, although he was named to one minor Commons committee on a petition from some inhabitants of Lincolnshire (2 Mar.).45CJ vii. 609a.

In public, Felton appeared to be just one more gentleman whose initial suspicions regarding the protectorate had been mollified by the Cromwellian government’s increasingly obvious return to the old ways. In reality Felton was by 1659 an active supporter of the exiled Stuarts and may have been so for quite some time. The king’s leading agent in East Anglia, Thomas Blague, had probably made contact with him as early as 1650 and in the process recruited him to the network of royalist conspirators.46Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 40. This link with the Stuart court is more likely to have assisted than hindered Felton’s electoral successes in 1656 and 1659. Around the time when he was elected to Parliament for the second time, he (unlike any of his rival candidates) was included by another royalist agent, Roger Whitley†, on his list of likely supporters of a rising in the name of Charles II.47Bodl. Eng. hist. e. 309, p. 42. In the summer of 1659, when the plans for such an uprising were almost complete, Felton was one potential conspirator who took offence at being kept in the dark.48CCSP iv. 225. The attempt by the council of state to place him under arrest as late as January 1660 may well have been prompted by information implicating him in the next wave of royalist plotting.49CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 568. In fact, the council’s suspicions were not far wrong, for 1st Viscount Mordaunt, the co-ordinator of the royalist intrigues in England, was in the meantime assuming that either Felton or 6th Viscount Hereford would take the lead in Suffolk should an uprising in the name of the king become necessary.50Clarendon SP, iii. 676. But not all his activities were so secret. He had already signed the Suffolk petition calling for a ‘free Parliament’ and he was one of the three representatives from the county who presented this to George Monck* at St Albans on 28 January.51Letter Agreed unto, and subscribed by, the Gentlemen, Ministers, Freeholders and Seamen of the Co. of Suff. (1659); Suff. ed. Everitt, 129; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 332. Felton’s record of support for a restoration of the monarchy during the 1650s made it possible for Charles II to describe him as ‘a person of great integrity and loyalty’ when ordering that he be granted a lease on the Suffolk hundreds of Bosmere, Claydon and Samford in 1662.52SP44/4, f. 60v. A further reward for his support came in the form of the appointment of his younger son, Thomas†, as a page of honour in 1665 and as a groom of the bedchamber in 1671.

By the late 1650s Felton was living at Playford in the house which had, for many years, been his grandmother’s dower house.53Bodl. Tanner 226, p. 52. Following the Restoration, this house, only four miles outside the town, provided a convenient base from which to involve himself in the civic affairs of Ipswich. The Ipswich corporation, via the former Cromwellian courtier, Nathaniel Bacon*, tried unsuccessfully in May 1660 to persuade Monck to include Felton and the other major local landowner, Viscount Hereford, on the commission to take over control of Landguard Fort, the key stronghold opposite Shotley at the mouth of the Orwell. The following month the corporation agreed to appoint both Felton and another committed royalist, Sir Frederick Cornwallis*, as free burgesses ‘in regard of their favours shown to the town’.54Layton, ‘Notices’, E. Anglian, n.s. vi. 263, 265. Then, in October 1660, he and the recorder, John Sicklemor*, were appointed deputy lieutenants of the town and instructed by the corporation to negotiate with the Suffolk deputy lieutenants in the hope of resolving the protracted dispute over the status of the town’s own militia.55Suff. ed. Everitt, 126; Layton, ‘Notices’, E. Anglian, n.s. vi. 316-18; vii. 40. It was Sicklemor who was sent by the corporation in November 1661 to thank Felton for the set of Bishop Brian Walton’s polyglot edition of the Bible in six volumes which he had presented to the town.56Layton, ‘Notices’, E. Anglian, n.s. vii. 92; J. Blatchly, Town Lib. of Ipswich (Woodbridge, 1989), 91. Felton retained close ties with Ipswich over the coming decades and the town was eager to encourage those ties, not least because Felton was now a figure of some importance within Suffolk.

Throughout the reign of Charles II there were few gentlemen more active than Felton in the affairs of south-east Suffolk. His duties as a justice of the peace, a deputy lieutenant and vice-admiral gave him his chance to serve his county in a way which had hitherto been denied to him. A further reason for his prominence in county affairs was that, as a result of the elections to the Convention in 1660 and to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, he continued to serve as knight of the shire. His 33 years of almost continuous service as an MP finally ended in 1679 because he was seen as being too closely associated with the court. He thereafter became a loyal tory.

When Felton died in 1690 he was buried in the church at Playford near his late wife.57Copinger, Manors of Suff. iii. 90; PROB11/402/85. As the bulk of his estates had already been settled on his eldest son, Adam†, at the time of the latter’s marriage to Elizabeth, the widow of Viscount Monson*, about 20 years before, Felton’s will confined itself largely to bequests for the rest of his surviving children.58PROB11/402/85. In time, three of Sir Henry’s sons, Adam, Thomas and Compton, inherited the baronetcy, but on the death of Sir Compton in 1719 the male line died out.